Developing Business Intelligence Apps for SharePoint

Chapter 30. Architecture to Support SharePoint BI

In this chapter, we discuss what is needed in order for IT professionals (“ITPros”) to properly support the SharePoint BI framework. We make some assumptions about the ITPro’s level of knowledge regarding SharePoint. We will not walk through the out-of-the-box implementation of SharePoint in this chapter, but instead will focus on the implementation that has been described in this book.

The following software is needed in order to implement what we cover in this book:

• SharePoint Enterprise Edition

• SharePoint databases backed on SQL 2008 R2 or higher

• SQL Server 2012 BI licensing or higher

• Visual Studio LightSwitch licensing

Warning

All of these licenses can be obtained for development under the umbrella of an MSDN Premium license.

You may wonder why we are not doing a walkthrough of implementing SharePoint out of the box. Instead, we chose to focus on a business intelligence solution and in doing so, assume that SharePoint is already a part of your current strategy. These next sections are targeted at the SharePoint ITPros who will support the environment that will contain the BI stack. If you are looking for a general implementation guide on setting up SharePoint, please see many of the other wonderful O’Reilly/Microsoft Press publications that cover that topic.

While Microsoft has put massive amounts of effort into the BI solutions that we cover, one of the areas that can be very confusing is figuring out what is required to actually make ...